“Half-past eleven!” Miss Hansford repeated. “Has it taken you half an hour to come home?”
“No, ma’am,” and Elithe stepped into her aunt’s room, and, standing in the centre of a broad patch of moonlight, which fell upon the floor from an uncurtained window, she continued: “We left the hotel at exactly eleven, but——” she hesitated, and her aunt asked:
“But what? What have you been doing since?”
“Whistling and waltzing on the causeway,” Elithe said, not defiantly, but as if she meant to tell the truth if the heavens fell.
“Whistling and waltzing!” Miss Hansford exclaimed, sitting up straight in bed like a Nemesis confronting the little girl standing in the moonlight wiping her wet face and pushing the damp hair from her forehead. “Do you know how wicked it is to waltz, and what is said of whistling girls and crowing hens?”
“Yes’m:
“Girls that whistle,
And hens that crow,
Make their way
Where’er they go,”